Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe discussion of the hand-made and hand-written cookbook of Ruth Bratu, who was evacuated from Prague in a Kindertransport in 1939, leads to a wide-ranging exploration of what we expect and what we can know about the cookbook. It discusses its recipes as well as Ruth Bratu's use of the cookbook's pages for handwritten notes about the 1941/42 political gatherings of exiles of the German Social Democratic Workers' Party in the Czechoslovak Republic in London. Above all, it is a reflection on Alltagsgeschichte, the use of a single document as a vehicle of historical interpretation, and not least the sensory recognition that this cookbook evoked for the author.

Even for readers of Central European History, it is easy to forget that there is more than one country in the middle of Europe and that there is more than one solution to the geopolitical problem associated with the perception of being in the "middle." That problem is so overwhelmingly claimed by Germany and its interpreters, and it is so weighed down by reflections on the (ab)uses of state power, articulated in the long-running debate on the "primacy of foreign policy," that it is somewhat jarring to encounter a book with the title In the Middle of Europe—André Holenstein's Mitten in Europa: Verflechtung und Abgrenzung in der Schweizer Geschichte—that is not at all concerned with Germany. It has Switzerland as its subject and Verschweizerung as its substance and subtext. I leave the term untranslated because it means nothing to most of the world and an English translation would surely not capture the partly facetious, partly scandalized, partly admiring undertones that the German conveys: "Die Welt wird entweder untergehen oder verschweizern," in the words of Friedrich Dürenmatt. Even if not taken in jest, it still sounds better than: "Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen." But if horror in the latter case makes sense when looking back at the twentieth century, why is there so much mockery in response to the former?

Kaum einer hat nachdrücklicher, vollmundiger und mit größerem Anspruch gegen die Katastrophe des Zeitalters der Weltkriege angeschrieben als Hans-Ulrich Wehler, der sich - paradoxerweise - bislang aber weitgehend aus der Historiographie dieser deutschen Krisenperiode herausgehalten hat. Der vierte Band seiner "Deutschen Gesellschaftsgeschichte" ist deshalb Prüfstein für Wehlers vorangegangene Arbeiten über das lange 19. Jahrhundert. Hier muss sich bewähren, was in jenen angelegt ist.

Geyer reviews 'Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany' by Nathan Stoltzfus.

The histories of Germany and the United States became deeply entangled in the century of total war. After (re)unification on the battlefield in the midnineteenth century, both countries underwent rapid transformations through national programs of industrialization based on new products and technologies and emerged as great powers with global pretensions at the beginning of the twentieth century. An initial, and somewhat hesitant, confrontation in World War I was followed by a period of oscillation and confusion during the 1920s and 1930s, as leading elements in the two economies sought grounds for collaboration even as the political development of the two nations diverged, one moving toward fascism, the other toward a liberal democratic renewal. This produced the deeply ideological collision of the Second World War, which resulted in an equally dramatic turnabout, as the Germans endured what Americans then most feared, a grim (albeit partial) communist takeover, and the United States became the staunch ally of the German west in its faceoff with the east. Recently this close partnership has turned into a more perplexed and occasionally suspicious friendship, as the familiar terrain of the cold war is ploughed up. This is a history of extreme reversals is tied inextricably to war and preparations for war.

"Der fünfzigste Jahrestag des Endes des Zweiten Weltkrieges ist von zwei fundamentalen Begebenheiten geprägt. Zum einen ist in Deutschland die Barriere des Schweigens gefallen, die so lange die Erinnerung an die Erfahrungen dieses Krieges von der Gegenwart getrennt hat. Zum anderen ist Europa mit den Ereignissen der Jahre 1989/91 in ein neues Zeitalter der Selbstbestimmung eingetreten. Diese beiden Begebenheiten verbinden sich - sie zeigen sich in einer Erneuerung des historischen Bewußtseins, die einen Epochenübergang erkennen läßt." (Autorenreferat)